In hopes of becoming the next Bruce Lee, 10-year-old Qiu Bao
endures demanding training at the Zhao Changjun Wushu
Institute, a martial arts school located in the suburbs of
Xi'an. For Qiu and his classmates, the tough conditions
represent a test of character in a hoped-for tradeoff for a
better future.

With a half-dozen ceiling fans pushing around the hot, humid
air in the school gymnasium, Qiu does his best to keep up with
the grueling daily routine. He dashes down a strip of burgundy
carpet, sweat pouring off his face, leaps in the air, sticks
his landing and returns to the back of the line to repeat the
process.

But the heat and exertion take their toll. During a
subsequent drill, Qiu falls, hitting the ground with a loud
thump. Hastily righting himself, he steals an apprehensive look
at his two trainers. Then, in the last group routine before a
break, he lags behind the other students, clearly exhausted,
with bruises visible on his slim legs. Yet by the end of the
drill, he manages to stand straight and tall, ultimately
triumphing over his shortcomings… Shortcomings will have to
disappear if Qiu hopes to ever prove that he can master this
demanding vocation.

Cultural assumptions don't always hold up in the light of
reality. How does China of the 21st century stack up against
views held in the US of the PRC as a rival for world power and
economic might, a proverbial Red Tide rising up in the Far
East?

New China, meet Old China. Now that the PRC is merging with
the global economy, its once hermetically-sealed culture has
opened itself to bold new influences. How successfully will the
Chinese adapt changes to their time-honored culture?

After three decades of impressive economic growth, China has
been jolted by the worldwide economic downturn. Millions of
workers are unemployed and strains risk both livelihoods and
the possibilities of social unrest. How is China coping?

Short on natural resources and dependent on exports, China
now relies on the rest of the world in many ways. How do larger
issues such as trade ties with South America and Africa or
protectionism in the US play out at home in China?

If a picture is worth a
thousand words, then how
about a soundslide, a video,
or an entire gallery of
pictures? We invite you
to take a tour of Reporting
China's visual chronicle
of a month in the life of
a richly varied country.

Traveling the China road in search of stories to
explain a beat as big and complex as the People's
Republic can't help but impress a group of reporters
with the country's marvelously varied visual resources.
Every pile of bricks stacked outside a construction
site, every flash of conspicuous consumption, every
farmer who says that a hard life is less hard than it
used to be attests to the fact that China is undergoing
a remarkable transformation from the grassroots up.
That process is inescapably reflected in the country's
rich menu of images – by turns gritty and elegant,
stodgy and sweeping, indelibly grim and endlessly
uplifting, uptempo and sophisticated. Our reporters,
photojournalists and multimedia-istas found such to be
the case in the big cities as well as the outlying
rural communities. Herewith the Reporting China team
offers a selection of photos chronicling our journey
from Beijing to Xi'an and Shanghai. . . .

It's no secret the Chinese government heavily
censors its country's news media. Controversial topics
are ignored and uncomfortable facts are sometimes
omitted, particularly when it comes to the Three T's:
Tibet, Tiananmen, and Taiwan. Newsroom editors must
routinely ask themselves what stories are appropriate
to run or risk having officials shut them down for
crossing the line.

Historically speaking, there is good reason for such
caution. Since the founding of the Peoples Republic in
1949, the news media have mainly served as an
instrument in the dissemination of government policy
and information, and is expected to show support for
such policies.

Because of the recent commercialization of media,
however, that may now be changing. “Commercial media is
only a couple of decades old in China,” said William
Moss, a specialist in international public relations. .
. .

Ten years ago, the African elite sent their children
to study at universities in America or Europe to ensure
their success and financial futures. Now, the target is
slowly shifting from the West to the East. “My father's
colleague told him if I studied in China I would always
have a job,” said Pitshou Ngoma, 29, whose father is an
agricultural minister in the Democratic Republic of
Congo. “So he sent me to Beijing.”

Africa's wealth of oil and other mineral resources
has long been of interest to China. China-Africa trade
has increased by an average 30 percent a year this
decade, reaching nearly $107 billion in 2008, according
to The New York Times. In order to solidify China's
hold in the developing economies, Prime Minister Wen
Jiabao went on a much publicized African tour early
this year, visiting eight pivotal countries. As
government ties deepen – bringing Chinese companies to
rural Africa to install roads, excavate minerals and
construct schools, many African students are seeking to
ride the Chinese tide to prosperity in their home
countries.

Many great questions have been pondered throughout
Chinese history. On a hot June day in 2009, four brave
women dared to ask: “Where is the toboggan?” Their
quest was part of this year's Reporting China assault
on the Great Wall of China and a special mission to
search out a toboggan ride discovered by the 2008
Reporting China team that provides travelers the option
of a little mechanical help in getting up to and down
from the battlements, with a few thrills and chills
thrown in for good measure. Join them now to see how
they fared.

When I arrived in China, I expected to meet people
sporting red armbands and green hats, like icons from a
1950s propaganda poster. So when I began seeing young
people in Beijing that broke this mold –
Mohawk-sporting musicians, tattooed skateboarders,
extreme-sport enthusiasts – it seemed more significant
than what this same behavior might mean back home. Thus
the question: In a country that has put so much stock
in conformity, do new forms of self-expression
represent small but meaningful forms of rebellion?

“Shanghai is a modern city… compared to most other
cities in China, so I came here to learn about
fashion,” said Zhang Yujing, a fashion design sophomore
at the city's Donghua University.

The travel Web site asiarooms.com said Shanghai was
one of the most popular tourist destinations in the
world and that fashion was a “booming industry.” The
site also said that over the past few decades, fashion
here had developed a unique style of its own,
attributing the trend to factors like the mixing of
indigenous and Western patterns of dressing or “East
Meets West”.

While the amount of fashion in and from Shanghai
that is truly representative of Chinese or Shanghai
fashion is debatable, few question that Shanghai is an
important global fashion post. When did the city become
a big player in the world fashion scene?

On American indie musician Brian Seymour's 2006 Web
site promoting his tour through China, he promised a
“fostering of cultural exchange and creative
collaboration.” So when he decided to perform at
Shanghai's Cotton's, a restaurant with a predominately
expat clientele on June 22, Seymour's intentions for
his most recent tour in China seemed to demonstrate
otherwise.

As expected, Seymour's audience at Cotton's was a
large expat crowd. If the listeners were not Chinese
who either lived or were born abroad, they were
foreigners.

The derailing of Seymour's good intentions is not
all that uncommon. Despite hopes for performing for
more ordinary Chinese when touring China, foreign indie
artists often find themselves playing for large expat
crowds. In fact, the economics of touring make it
almost unavoidable. Artists and their promoters have a
hard time making a profit if they do not tap the expat
demand.

In matters of culture, momentum is not necessarily a
function of time. Haipaicai, or Shanghai-style cuisine,
has a history less than two decades old, yet the
gravitational pull of the city's food scene is no less
effective or transformative than that of time-honored
culinary bastions like New York and Paris.

The concept of creating a unique culinary identity
by adaptating various regional flavors from all over
China was primarily a marketing scheme devised by
Chinese Communist Party officials in the 1980s to
promote Shanghai as a happening place for culture, as
well as finance and markets. And it's worked—today
there are over 20,000 restaurants in Shanghai alone,
and in one way or another, they all owe their history
to this culinary development.

In the trendy Maoming Road section of Shanghai,
Longwu Kung Fu has established itself as a popular
martial arts center among both local Chinese and
foreigners as well. That is thanks in large part to the
studio's owner, Alvin Guo, who has dedicated his life
to the study of wushu, as martial arts is known in
Mandarin, since he was three years old.

Guo was captain of the prestigous Shanghai Wushu
Team for 12 years, as well as a three-time national
champion, until an ankle injury forced him from
competition to become the Chief Instructor and Director
of his wushu center. “Kung Fu is getting [more]
popular,” says Guo, now 32.

When Celestin, 39, traveled from his native Rwanda
to Beijing China on a scholarship to study economics in
1998, his Chinese classmates didn't know what to make
of him.

“They didn't think I could be very intelligent,”
Celestin said, who preferred that only his first name
be used in this story to protect his privacy.

When he shared the top score on a citywide economics
exam with a Chinese student, they had to revise their
opinion. This isn't the only change he's seen in his
adopted home of Beijing.
In the past ten years, Celestin traded economics for
computer science, developing a successful embassy
IT-support business as well as exporting electronics to
Rwanda.

I recently had the opportunity to ask this
relatively simple question to 20 strangers on the
streets of Shanghai, and while the answers went in
various directions, ranging from physique to a woman's
timeliness, the most interesting answer, and also the
one most foreign to me, was the concept of having “qi
zhi.”

Eleven out of the 20 respondents listed “qi zhi” in
their top-three picks for what makes a woman
attractive, with eight out of the eleven listing the
concept as number one. The rest answered that it was
the second most important requirement.

From the convoluted reactions I received when I
asked what exactly “qi zhi” meant, it appears there is
no simple or direct translation into any concept that
we might be familiar with in America. In fact, people
resorted to lengthy explanations and extensive
metaphors to explain the idea to a visitor.

Our Mission

In late May 2009, 15 students from the University of
Texas at Austin J-school set out to travel China and
discover what is really going on in one of the world's
fastest-growing countries. This is our collective
account of what we found – in stories, photos,
slideshows and Tweets.